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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22604674">We'll Both Be Disappointed</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/VMorticia/pseuds/VMorticia'>VMorticia</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Random Fics I'm Probably Never Going To Finish... [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Doctor Who, Marvel Cinematic Universe</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Character Death, Gen, Revenge, Time Travel</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 11:48:39</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,864</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22604674</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/VMorticia/pseuds/VMorticia</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Half of all life in the universe... but there were only two of them left.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>The Doctor &amp; The Master (Doctor Who)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Random Fics I'm Probably Never Going To Finish... [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1563013</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>21</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>---</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Master glared balefully at her captor. The Doctor ignored her, almost cheerfully. This was normal. Ever since the whole thing with little miss Clara and the Cybermen, he'd been a bit less concerned with saving her and a lot more concerned with containing her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He'd always been an idiot for not just multitasking, really.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It had been a relatively normal day in the Vault. That human had been chattering about something, and the inane android seemed to think it was clever, so obviously it wasn't. The Master played the piano, trying to drown out the din.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Doctor had interrupted them with the announcement that something strange was going on, and as a reward for good behaviour the Master was allowed to join them, if she kept her hands to herself and didn't steal any TARDISes or other all-powerful baubles.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Reluctantly, fingers crossed, she had agreed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She should have known better. The Doctor never took her anywhere fun.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Hence the glaring and ignoring.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But then someone nearby screamed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>As it turned out, the much hoped for entertainment of blood and violence didn't appear. The horror here was much more existential.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>People were disappearing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dissolving into dust, atoms, nothingness.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Whatever it was swept through the area </span>
  <em>
    <span>fast</span>
  </em>
  <span>, taking perhaps half the people with it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The frizzy human was one of them. Sadly, the annoying android was not.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Just when they thought it was over, and the Doctor was scanning the area in which his pet human had been standing, trying to figure out what had happened... the same thing started to happen to </span>
  <em>
    <span>him</span>
  </em>
  <span>, as well.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Master rushed forward, but he was gone before she got there.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The android levelled a suspicious, accusing stare at her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Oh, don't give me that look," she hissed bitterly. "If I had done this, you'd have gone first."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The sound of the cloister bells rang, and the Master looked up sharply. The android frowned, but while he knew what that must mean he didn't seem sure how to react. The Master had no such compunction.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She ran straight into the TARDIS.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The TARDIS was in distress. It was more than simply apocalyptic, it was personal in every way. Whatever had devastated the population here - including the Doctor and his pet human - was affecting the TARDIS as well. Existing outside time just meant it was taking longer to take effect.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Find the source," the Master commanded. "If I can't fix it, I'll at least kill it."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Generally the Doctor's TARDIS didn't like the Master. It was little surprise, after all she had done to it. Still, it understood the mutual need, and it obeyed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was a bumpy ride... note to self: never travel in a literally disintegrating TARDIS again. Bad idea. Very bad idea.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She landed alone, on her hands and knees, in a cloud of dust. She looked around, finding herself on a grassy plain, who knew where. At least it was an actual planet, and not either the vortex or deep space.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nardole didn't make it, either, it seemed. He hadn't been disintegrating... either he hadn't even followed her into the TARDIS, or he'd been dumped out somewhere else.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then she spotted a humanoid figure.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She </span>
  <em>
    <span>knew</span>
  </em>
  <span> he was responsible.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She had no idea who he was, or how or why he had done what he had done, but she </span>
  <em>
    <span>knew</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Time Lords aren't named purely for vanity, they have an array of extra-sensory abilities, beyond what most mortal beings comprehend. She could sense the power radiating around him. She could read the probabilities, as if watching everything she was about to try to do play out, so she could pick the right one. She could even skip between adjacent timelines, in dire circumstances, but that wasn't easy or pleasant to do.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She followed the branches to attack without being seen, until it was too late for him to stop her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>This future-sense was very short-lived, no more than a minute at a time unless one entered a deep meditation. Still, it was enough for her to see his reactions, and his weapons before he used them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Not to mention the consequences of her mistakes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It wasn't as rare as she'd like that she relied on this sense to survive. It contributed to her grand negotiating skills, learning what words could prevent violence by her usually-inclined-to-violence 'allies'. Cooperating with Daleks and Cybermen lent one to anticipating the worst, because that was their standard operating procedure.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>This being was no different.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was only one path in which she </span>
  <em>
    <span>didn't</span>
  </em>
  <span> die fighting him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It didn't even kill him, more's the shame, but it allowed her to begin the long game.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her favourite.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She slipped past his instinctive backhand, when he first noticed her approach... ducked under his attempt to grab her by the throat... reached out without hesitation to the gauntlet he wore... snatched the green gem from it... and used the power therein to flee.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>So much for no stealing all-powerful baubles. The Doctor would be so proud and disappointed in equal measure.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Now to find a way to bring him back, so she could rub this in his face.</span>
</p><p>---</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>---</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Time Stone. That was its name.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She wasn't sure how she came to know that, she just knew it because it was now hers. Finders keepers, and all that.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Most other beings would be destroyed by merely touching pure Time like this, but the Time Lords were attuned to it; practically made for it, really. The Master had spent more lifetimes than she cared to count abusing and being abused by Time, to the point where handling its pure form like this was almost comfortable.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Almost.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Time was a tricky entity, actually sentient if you knew how to communicate with it. The Master had never met Time, but now she held this stone she could look into the element of it, and see things long forgotten and not yet to be, in a way no Time Lord ever had before.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She remembered her childhood.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She remembered meeting Death.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Old Gallifreyan fairy tales spoke of the four Cosmic Entities - the personifications of the universe. Pain was the oldest, but because he existed before Time, he was also the son of Life, who was Time's younger brother. Death was also part of this family, though the legends disagreed on how... one of the more popular of these tales suggested that Death and Life were in love; Life created its gifts for Death, and Death adored and kept every one.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Depending on which version of the stories one read, sometimes there was a fifth, named Fate... but Death had denied this when the Master met her. Fate was an illusion, to placate those who lacked the strength of choice.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Death had claimed the Master as her champion... which, oddly, had nothing to do with the Master's general propensity to kill people. In fact, Death seemed none too fond of violence and cruelty. Death was the kindness after that, not the reason for it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Time Stone wasn't the entity of Time, and yet it also was; the stone was the spark that birthed the entity, and also its remains after its demise, the raw power and energy that fuelled and bound the element of Time throughout the universe... and now it showed the Master its full glory.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Winding paths, visible through the mists of the Untempered Schism in a way they hadn't been the first time, weaving into an intricate tapestry, spelling out stories clear enough to read.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The path the Titan took to his conquest, traced backwards... the six Stones, as they wound through the universe... the branches and choices that could change that past...</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But there were pieces missing, and the Master would have to seek out that vital knowledge, to see the whole picture... and she needed to see it, to read it, before she dared change it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>---</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>---</p><p>Escaping wasn't so easy as one might expect. There really only was one way out.</p><p>Her only means of transport, after all, was time travel. Time, not Space. Frankly, she should count herself lucky that it followed the common law of time travel, in holding to the gravitational pull of the local planet rather than the exact point in space.</p><p>The local planet had never been touched by sentient life before that hated being, nor would it be after. It had no name of its own; he had simply called it Garden.</p><p>On the bright side, travel far enough backwards or forwards and everything comes together eventually. In the distant last centuries of the life of the universe itself, Garden - now a dead rogue planetoid hurtling through the void - crossed atmospheres briefly with several other dead and dying worlds in the crashing mess locally referred to as the Silver Devastation.</p><p>From a safe distance, she remembered it looked almost like a gleaming knife-edge, sparling in the sky. Up close, it was composed of dozens of dead and dying stars and planetoids rushing together, colliding with clouds of dark matter and collapsing into themselves. It was a very slow and drawn out dance of death, but that nevertheless was exactly what it was.</p><p>She carefully timed her arrival to allow her to step over to one of these other dead worlds, right at the edge of the Devastation. With Time quite literally at her side, she could see what it had once been - an iceworld, bitterly cold even to her kind, but beautiful all the more for its deadliness. In its prime a glittering city of ice had once sat upon the mountaintop she found herself standing atop. Even now, large stairs carved into the stone aided her descent.</p><p>Since its heyday, this world had fallen into ruin many centuries before it had eventually been burned by its own star's nova, seared so badly that even the rock beneath her feet had in many places turned to glass that crunched beneath her delicately heeled boots. Barely surviving intact, and certainly devoid of all life by that point, it had drifted through the void for aeons as little more than a hollow shell of its former self. Utterly dead, until very recently.</p><p>Life had returned to this planet not by nature but by chance, only hours before she had chosen to arrive. Of course, she knew this because it was her past.</p><p>She reached the foot of the mountain and casually stepped over the unconscious form of her own younger self - he would survive, she already had done - and into her own TARDIS. He wouldn't need it, from here on, anyhow. It had tactfully disguised itself as one of the many ancient stone pillars littering the area, appearing part-melted to a glossy black, just like the ground around it.</p><p>Inside, it was just as she remembered it.</p><p>A cold homecoming, because <em> he </em> wasn't here to torment with it.</p><p>She really would have to fix that.</p><p>She set the stone on her TARDIS' console, and looked at it thoughtfully. So many pathways laid out before her, now. Literal infinity at her fingertips.</p><p>She wasn't one to speak to her TARDIS, but Time itself, well...</p><p>"Now when should we begin?"</p><p>---</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>It's possible but unlikely that I'll continue this fic.... mostly I'm just posting it to get it out of my head, and as a prompt if anyone else would be willing to take up the plot.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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